Visible to the public On the Strategy and Behavior of Bitcoin Mining with N-attackers

TitleOn the Strategy and Behavior of Bitcoin Mining with N-attackers
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsLiu, Hanqing, Ruan, Na, Du, Rongtian, Jia, Weijia
Conference NameProceedings of the 2018 on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-5576-6
Keywordsbitcoin, bitcoin security, Human Behavior, mining, n-attackers, pubcrawl, Scalability, selfish mining
AbstractSelfish mining is a well-known mining attack strategy discovered by Eyal and Sirer in 2014. After that, the attackers' strategy has been further discussed by many other works, which analyze the strategy and behavior of a single attacker. The extension of the strategy research is greatly restricted by the assumption that there is only one attacker in the blockchain network, since, in many cases, a proof of work blockchain has multiple attackers. The attackers can be independent of others instead of sharing information and attacking the blockchain as a whole. In this paper, we will establish a new model to analyze the miners' behavior in a proof of work blockchain with multiple attackers. Based on our model, we extend the attackers' strategy by proposing a new strategy set publish-n. Meanwhile, we will also review other attacking strategies such as selfish mining and stubborn mining in our model to explore whether these strategies work or not when there are multiple attackers. The performances of different strategies are compared using relative stale block rate of the attackers. In a proof of work blockchain model with two attackers, strategy publish-n can beat selfish mining by up to 26.3%.
URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3196494.3196512
DOI10.1145/3196494.3196512
Citation Keyliu_strategy_2018